Nextcloud: The Number One-Solution for your personal and private cloud!

Some days ago, Nextcloud invited their users to write a review of the private cloud solution on Capterra. Besides of the gift card that was a nice bait I thought it would be a great idea to put down some lines telling interested readers something about Nextcloud. I could write a real big essay here but sticking to the short reviews on Capterra, let's focus on the Pro-, Contra- and the Overall aspects of this solution.

Pros: Nextcloud appeared from the vast ruins of ownCloud which I always liked, but always hassled with once there was an update. It was vital from the very beginning, it was more open, it was more stable - and everything you needed to get if up and running worked like a charm straight from the scratch. With each version there was not only an evolution, but a refinement of features, an open conversation with the community (something ownCloud really lacked of) and a visible progress. Besides, working and using Nextcloud is just wonderful.

Nextcloud Logo

Cons: Nothing that would be worth mentioning - indeed there are no negative aspects regarding my use case and the use case of my customers. It would be nice to get a fully-features IMAP-server integrated in Nextcloud, but this is a luxury issue ;) !

Overall: It has been a great journey from the very beginning to the beta-status of Version 17 (currently in Beta 3). The solution worked out of the box and can be extended with many stable plugins so that there is anything you can dream of which can be implemented - even with writing an app on your own!

Capterra Review of Nextcloud

The "final" bottom line: I really enjoy Nextcloud and have done so from the very beginning. I mainly use the clients to connect from my Mac or my iPhone and I do also use them on my Windows machine. Being at home mostly on Apple-hardware, it is also nice to see that Nextcloud is at home everywhere, wiping away boundaries between the systems. For example, my Enpass password vault syncs via WebDAV to my MacBook Pro, my Mac mini, my iPhone and my Windows machine.

I do most of my basic writing work with the help of Collabora Online which helps me to keep my edited data in my private cloud while editing my documents straight from the browser. If I miss anything, any feature, there are plenty of apps for nearly every need to extend your own, private cloud and to form it to YOUR cloud. It doesn't care if you host your instance on an Intel NUC at home for example or within a VPS at your trusted provider's data center: The main element and the key to your independent, Open Source cloud solution is Nextcloud - its deployment is quite easy and you won't miss anything once you made the switch from one of the big public cloud providers.